Archive for May 2009

“Nimble indie rapper and former Pitchfork writer Rollie Pemberton, aka Cadence Weapon, is now a poet motherf–king laureate. According to The Canadian Press, on July 1, Pemberton will officially start his two-year tenure as laureate of his native city, Edmonton, Alberta.

To be clear: There is a guy who used to write for Pitchfork who is now a poet laureate. See mom, I told you this isn’t a dead-end career!
But, in true hip-hop fashion, there are a few haters none too happy with the appointment. Swagger jackers include departing laureate E.D. Blodgett, ‘a 74-year-old professor emeritus who has published 19 collections of poetry,’ according to The Globe and Mail.

But Pemberton is brushing them off, saying, ‘Maybe I should have a poet battle. If people have beef, we’ll see who has the illest prose. Who can do a poem about a flower better? I can make you feel like this flower is in your mouth, man. Delicate.’ Somebody get Smack DVD on line one!

Just last month, we released our two new selections of Kenneth Rexroth’s translations, Written on the Sky: Poems from the Japanese and Songs of Love, Moon, and Wind: Poems from the Chinese.

About a week or so ago, I received an email from one bookseller commenting on the books, saying that he generally found Rexroth’s Chinese translations more interesting than the Japanese ones but also expressing an ambivalence about a certain flatness of tone in Rexroth’s translation. Not knowing any Chinese, I asked one of the editors who speaks and reads Chinese. The editor replied that the bookseller was correct, that there is a certain flatness in Rexroth’s translations but it was that exact quality which he liked so much in Rexroth’s translations. However, he went on to say that he knew poets who preferred David Hinton’s translations.

I’ve been meaning to hunt down a Chinese poem translated by various translators to do a comparison…so I turned to The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. New Directions has a long history of publishing poems from the Chinese since they first published Ezra Pound’s translations which Pound worked through to arrive at his Ideogrammic method of poetry. Many of the classic Chinese poems that are being translated today are the same poems that were translated by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.

In light of the email, here are some comparison translations of a poem by Meng Hao-Jen:

William Carlos Williams’ translation:

Steering my little boat towards a misty islet,
I watch the sun descent while my sorrows grow:
In the vast night the sky hangs lower than the treetops,
But in the blue lake the moon is coming close.

Kenneth Rexroth’s translation:

Night on the Great River

We anchor the boat alongside a hazy island.
As the sun sets I am overwhelmed with nostalgia.
The plain stretches away without limit.
The sky is just above the tree tops.
The river flows quietly by.
The moon comes down amongst men.

Gary Snyder’s translation:

Mooring on Chien-Te River

The boat rocks at anchor by the misty island
Sunset, my loneliness comes again.
In these vast wilds the sky arches down to the trees.
In the clear river water, the moon draws near.

How personal and interpretative, a rewriting in essence, a translation can be is revealed in these variations. In the first translation, Williams leaves the poem untitled while Snyder and Rexroth give quite different meanings to the title. Rexroth’s Night on the Great River is quiet and static while Snyder’s uses the verb “mooring”. I was struck by how both Williams and Snyder used the word “misty” while Rexroth used “hazy.” Additionally, Rexroth’s choice of “nostalgia” has a very different tone than Snyder’s loneliness or Williams’ more dramatic “sorrow.” Rexroth’s translation is looser, less condensed. While not quite vernacular, there is an almost everydayness to Rexroth’s language.

And here’s the same poem by Li Po translated respectively by Ezra Pound and David Hinton:

Ezra Pound’s translation:

Separation on the River Kiang

Ko-jin goes west from Ko-kaku-ro,
The smoke-flowers are blurred over the river.
His lone sail blots the far sky.
And now I see only the river,
The long Kiang, reaching heaven.

From Yellow-Crane Tower, my old friend leaves the west.
Downstream to Yang-chou, late spring a haze of blossoms,

distant glints of lone sail vanish into emerald-green air:
nothing left but a river flowing on the borders of heaven.

In this poem by Li Po, if I didn’t see the two translations set side by side, I would think that they were actually two different poems. Pound’s translation embodies much of the musicality in his Cantos, and I assume that he’s freestyling much more than Hinton in order to achieve alliteration. While the difference between the two can be seen (the short title by Pound and the long title by Hinton), it is most obvious when reading the translations out loud. Pound’s short lines and muscular language makes for a more staccato read while Hinton’s word choices which are heavier on vowels forces the tongue to slow down.

By the way, even though the translations are by various translators, it’s worth mentioning that The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, Written on the Sky, as well as Songs of Love, Moon and Wind were all put together by the singular Eliot Weinberger.

We invite y’all to help us celebrate the publication of The Halfway House, a book that took a couple of years and a trip to Miami for our editor to work out the acquisition. And all her efforts were worth it.

When I read the Halfway House, I was supposedly going out the door to pick up a friend at the airport. Instead, I found myself gripped by the story, unable to move until I had found out the fate of William and Frances.

There was a recent contest by poets.org to see who could best render the text of poems in a visual way. Sixteen winners had their renderings featured on the website, including William Carlos William’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”. This was featured in the newsletter, but I thought there were other neat renderings (Denise Levertov’s “Now Shall I Walk Barefoot?” spelled out with many pairs of shoes on a sidewalk; a bar overlooking a bridge with Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning” sort of spray painted on the metal (I say sort of because the artistic culprit wrote “I’m Not Waving I’m Drowning” and credited himself…weird); as well a section of Inger Christensen long poem written in Danish on the side of a building! If anyone knows how to get to this building, please write the directions in the comment box.

I thought some of the other visualized poems that featured among others David Berman (the cake), Edna St. Vincent Millay (the candle), and Robert Frost (the swimmer’s) were fantastic. I’m not an active reader of the two latter, but I think David Berman is the bee’s knees.

In a way these remind me of Kenneth Patchen’s wonderfully visualized poems. Last year’s We Meet and The Walking-Away World were both given laudatory introductions from both musician Devendra Banhart as well as cartoonist Jim Woodring. It was great to read their words of praise for Patchen and his highly idiosyncratic visual poems. (It would be great if Patchen were “discovered” by The American Folk Art Museum adjacent to Moma…ahem). Though I was disappointed not to find any of Patchen’s work on poets.org, poetryfoundation.org had a series a year ago titled “The Poem as Comic Strip” and yes, a Patchen poem was graphically rendered in a four paneled strip by Ron Regé Jr..